The ACC is loaded with NBA Draft prospects this year.
There’s just not another way to put it. As one NBA team executive put it to me, "there are going to be just random Wednesday nights where you turn on the TV and it’s like ‘oh, a pair of potential first-rounders in Jaron Blossomgame and Tyler Lydon are facing off.’ Or, ‘oh, Dennis Smith has to deal with Virginia and its physical guards.'" Every single night, this league is going to have a marquee matchup worth watching if you’re an NBA Draft fan. It is, by far, the conference that NBA scouts will watch more than any other over the course of the coming season.
That is reflected in the first iteration of Sporting News' 2017 NBA Draft prospect rankings. The league has three players in the top five, eight in the top 22, and 10 overall in the top 30 entering the year. Those 10 prospects in the top 30 are the same number as the Pac-12 (four), the SEC (three), and the Big Ten (three) combined. So yeah, we’re going to be talking a lot about the ACC in this space this year.
But even beneath the surface in the ACC, there are plenty of other potential NBA players lurking, just waiting for a true breakout season.
Particularly, Louisville looks to be a school that could feature multiple breakout players. The Cardinals have Donovan Mitchell, Deng Adel, and Raymond Spalding who look to be potential breakout sophomores within the league this year. (I got a chance to speak with Mitchell and Adel this summer at Adidas Nations, and have broken them out into a separate feature.)
Beyond that trio, there are plenty of other players just below the radar who could take that next step into becoming a star within the league and moving onto NBA Draft boards. Keeping in mind this is not a ranking, here’s a quick breakdown on some of the more unrecognized players that could really help themselves take a leap forward on NBA Draft boards this coming season — including a longer breakdown on one player who I think is particularly off the board for many right now.
At 6-4 with a 6-foot-7-plus wingspan, Crawford has terrific size for the point guard position, and he knows how to utilize that size pretty well. Defensively, he does an excellent job of getting into passing lanes, as his 3.0 steal percentage is the top returning mark in the ACC. He is also pretty solid at providing ball pressure on smaller players, as his length and quickness would indicate.
On the other end, Crawford uses his size to shoot over smaller players defending him. Crawford hit right around 35 percent of his 3-pointers last season, including finishing with an excellent 56.1 effective field goal percentage on catch-and-shoot opportunities. As seen above, he also does a solid job of keeping the same mechanics on shots off the dribble, and should continue to grow as a scorer because of this skill.
However, he has not quite figured out how to finish at the rim yet. He made only 30 of his 80 attempts at the rim in the halfcourt last season, placing him in the eighth percentile in all of college basketball, according to Synergy. As seen above, Crawford does have strong body control, but as with many young guards he seems to avoid contact with acrobatics at the expense of drawing fouls.
Crawford should draw those fouls at a higher rate this season, as he possesses a strong first step as well as good ball-handling ability with which to build around. He’s a creator, through and through, and that translates to helping others get shots as well. He put up a 28.5 assist percentage, which is the highest returning mark in the ACC. Crawford excels in the open floor, where he is good at weighting lead passes to players running floor at the rim.
It’s not all great for Crawford, though. The biggest place for concern with Crawford right now comes with turnovers. He put up a 20.6 turnover rate last season, with many occurring simply due to carelessness such as dribbling randomly off of his foot at a standstill, or not being protective enough while initiating plays. Part of this could simply be youth — he is young for the class, playing his entire freshman season at 18 years old — but improvement in this capacity is a necessity.
Overall, Crawford’s situation compares somewhat favorably to that of Wade Baldwin last season. Like Crawford, Baldwin was someone who returned to school for his sophomore season as a solid-shooting, high-assist, high-steal, high-turnover point guard with rangy arms and poor finishing at the rim despite size. In fact, over the last seven seasons, Baldwin, Tyler Ennis, Kyrie Irving, and Crawford are the only high-major players to put up a freshman season featuring at least nine points per game, a 28 percent assist rate and a three percent steal rate. The previous three players became first-round picks, and Crawford has a chance to develop along that same trajectory if he can improve his finishing around the rim and turnover propensity.
He’s an athlete who can defend multiple positions due to his size, as well as attack closeouts as the thunderous dunk below showed a season ago. Beachem has a shot to get into the late first-round conversation with a big senior season.
Kennedy Meeks is the bigger name returning the North Carolina frontcourt, but Hicks is my choice for the player who can have the biggest impact in replacing All-American Brice Johnson.
No comments:
Post a Comment